Laura Defazio's Art at Ohiopyle

Hi, my name is Laura DeFazio, and I'm a professor at California University of Pennsylvania. And I'm here at Ohiopyle working on a public art project in the playground in the center of town. I got involved in this project when I got an email from a former Cal U student, Christina Lee, who was hired to coordinate a program to bring public art to six of the towns along the Great Allegheny Passage. I had four boulders of sandstone installed in the park, and I'm carving images of the native wildlife into the stone. I came up with an idea of earth, wind, air, and fire... the natural elements that surround us here in the ways that they are meaningful to us as the theme for the project, and I'm carving images of water animals on one rock: fish, otter, beavers, amphibians. That rock is set in the ground. Then I have a rock that is big enough to picnic on, and I have animals that live on the ground on that rock. There's a third rock that's swoopy and kind of cloud-shaped, and that rock has the images of animals that live in the air. And the last rock, the really tall rock, is the fire rock, and my take on fire here at Ohiopyle are the constellations of the night sky. So, I have around the top of the rock, images of the constellations that you can identify: the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Hercules, Orion, etc. And, then I also have a couple holding hands under the moonlight, just a little sliver of them as also part of the fire rock and I wanted to feature the natural beauty that surrounds us here because that is the big draw. Ohiopyle has an annual visitor traffic of 1.5 to 2 million people per year, and the nature is what brings them here, so I really wanted to show off what's so compelling about Ohiopyle in this project. It's just been a really awesome experience.